Jessica Collins
Cleveland, TN
Jessica is a contemporary artist who currently lives in Tennessee. She is a painter whose work primarily deals with spirituality and identity.
Message
Jessica Collins is a native Virginian who has lived in and around the Chattanooga and Cleveland, Tennessee areas for over 20 years. She graduated high school from Baylor School as a boarding student in 1999, then went on to attend college, receiving her BA in English and Art from Appalachian State University. She then studied education at East Tennessee State University, receiving a Master of Arts in Teaching there. Her passion for art then led her to Academy of Art University, where she received an MFA in figurative painting.
Jessica started off her art career as a portrait artist, mostly painting self-portraits in oil, as well as pastels. During this time, she also taught art for 12 years in both public and private schools in Southwest Virginia and East Tennessee. When her daughter was born in 2009, she put a hold on her art career and focused on raising her child. Then, in 2018, Jessica was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, disabling her to the point that she needed to stop teaching altogether. She was also diagnosed with breast cancer in 2019, further complicating things in regards to her ability to create art.
Despite these health challenges, Jessica began learning how to create fluid art, since her MS made it difficult to hold a paint brush steadily. By using a multitude of different techniques and always pouring the paint onto the canvas, Jessica has been able to reignite her creative spark over the last several years, and her new body of work represents not only her ability to fight cancer and her chronic illness, but her strength and resilience in the face of many hardships in her life. Jessica loves creating art, and she continues to paint out of her home studio in Cleveland, TN.
Statement
I began creating acrylic pours over three years ago, after a nearly 9 year hiatus from creating art. I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2018 after several years of tests and differential diagnoses. It had become very difficult for me to create portraits, which I was trained in, due to all the issues with my hands because of MS. So I gave up on art until 2023, which is when I first watched someone doing acrylic pours on YouTube. It was fascinating the way the paint moved and created beautiful effects, and I really wanted to try it, so I purchased a paint pouring kit and tried my hand at it. My first painting was a disaster, and I thought maybe it just wasn’t for me. However, I decided to keep trying because it fulfilled my desire to create, which had been absent for so long. With each painting, I got better and more confident at manipulating the paint to create ephemeral images that were unique and unable to be replicated. Each piece is like a memory, fleeting and malleable, and I have formed a unique bond with each one.
One of the themes of my work centers around liminal spaces, which are transitional or in-between states. I am currently in a liminal space myself, between my past portrait work and my new body of work, which includes pieces that incorporate my painting and drawing skills, as well as my own poetry, and deals more heavily with spirituality. My collection of abstract acrylic pours, called "Coming Home," reflects my transition from starting something completely new and different to developing mastery over the materials and being able to manipulate them into beautiful works of art that move beyond mere decoration and enter the territory of fine art.